This is the TBTF Log, week of 2000-01-23, an experiment in reporting important breaking news
in a very timely way. The
TBTF newsletter continues unchanged. The most recent issue is
TBTF for 1999-12-16: Humble.

The current issue of the "Industry Standard - the magazine of
the internet economy" (Jan. 24, 2000) has an interesting
article on the key players in the internet industry -- "The
Web's Gatekeepers." In the print version (page 204) they show
the partial ego-networks of the 4 "gatekeepers": AOL-TW, AT&T,
Microsoft, Yahoo. The ego-networks reveal some of the
strategic alliances these 4 companies have formed.

I combined the 4 ego nets and added other recent alliance data
to create an Internet industry network of some 50+ players.
The network is displayed in an interactive Java applet.

1/26/00 11:26:55 AM

How big is the Web today?
Today the Censorware Project released a
dynamic essay on the
size of the Web -- a page that gives a daily estimate -- in order
to put into context the task of "filtering the web." (As you might
expect, this task is impossible on its face.) Here are today's figures.

So, as of today (these figures are dynamically generated on a
daily basis), the web has roughly:
1,570,000,000 pages;
29,400,000,000,000 bytes of text;
353,000,000 images; and
5,880,000,000,000 bytes of image data.
In just the last 24 hours, the web has added:
3,180,000 new pages;
59,700,000,000 new bytes of text;
716,000 new images; and
11,900,000,000 new bytes of image data.
And of course, any web page can be changed or removed or any time.
Changes may be minor, major, or total. According to Alexa, which
is striving valiantly to create archive snapshots of major
portions of the web, the average lifespan of a webpage is about 44
days, which means that in the last 24 hours, about:
35,600,000 pages changed; and
8,020,000 images changed.

Tuesday, January 25, 2000

The avant-garde Internet art group etoy declared final victory
today in its battle against Net merchant eToys. The toy retailer had
filed suit against the art
group apparently because their domain names were similar. What an ill-advised
and self-destructive move. Today eToys
agreed
to pay up to $40,000 in legal fees to etoy and to drop the suit "without
prejudice."

I've placed the etoy victory press
release on the TBTF archive. It's a wonder of stylized bombast. An
excerpt:

on monday, january 24, 2000, the
TOYWAR.crisis-control-board, 1345 special
TOYWAR.agents and media warriors triggered
another firestorm : within a few hours
many hundred EMAIL-TOY-BOMBS exploded in
the brains of customers, e-shoppers, brokers
and nervous business men all over the world.

no one got hurt - but the message is placed
and the eToys share value sunk below its
initial price of $20: value on tuesday /
11.12 AM: $19.0625 per share unit.

one of the targets of the violence-free
toy-bombing was the eToys HQ in santa monica
.. eToys felt that it is now time to drop
this lawsuit and to accept all the demands
the etoy.CORPORATION submitted.

Monday, January 24, 2000

1/24/00 5:27:06 PM

FTC names 40 to a privacy/security committee.
The US Federal Trade Commission is grappling with questions of
consumer privacy in the online medium. The agency has
selected the
members of that will light its path through the thicket of issues
of free trade, interstate commerce, and the right to be left
alone. The body is called the Advisory Committee on Online Access
and Security. Among the committee members are staffers from EIPC,
the EFF, and the CDT, as well as freelance security specialist
Richard Smith. They get to spend a couple of months of unpaid
labor tussling with heavyweights from Walt Disney, Time Warner,
Microsoft, DoubleClick, and Engage Technologies.

Sunday, January 23, 2000

1/23/00 10:49:32 PM

Registrars now accepting long domain names.
Now that all the "good" domain names are gone, we're seeing more
jammed-together phrases in front the .com, .net, or .org suffix.
Anyone who registered through NSI or Register.com until recently ran
up against a limit of 26 characters total. Why so constricted? The
RFC
defining domain names (search for "length") allows 63 characters
before the suffix. Search Engine Watch
reported
on what was apparently the first registry to allow full-length
names. Now a
Hawaiian
outfit has set up business under what it claims is the longest
word in English -- intended as a magnet fir those wishing to register
long domain names. Still they only managed to get to 49 characters
total. (What is the longest word in English? This
treatise proves that there
is no answer to the question this side of 1,913 characters.)

This venue represents an experiment in more timely and less "cooked"
TBTF news coverage. You'll read here things that came through my
desktop machine mere minutes before. The TBTF Log replaces the Tasty
Bit of the Day feature.

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The email and Web editions of Tasty Bits from the Technology Front
represent my best effort to present engaging, cogent news and analysis
on what matters to the life of the Net. The TBTF newsletter will continue
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